The Bonneville Run is a road trip being undertaken by a group of Australians. We're travelling from Perth in Western Australia and putting together the ultimate road trip. The 2010 version of the trip stated and ended in San Jose, California and over 5000 miles of driving later, we'd visited Los Angeles, Las Vegas, The Grand Canyon and much more. The highlight of the journey is a visit to the Bonneville Salt Flats for the SCTA's Bonneville SpeedWeek 2010.

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Thursday, August 5, 2010

Petersen Auto Museum and Wally Parks NHRA Museum

Today was our first full day in Los Angeles and we spent the day visiting the Petersen Automotive Museum and the Wally Parks NHRA Museum. After having breakfast at the diner in our hotel, we headed out to the Petersen Automotive Museum on Wilshire Boulevard. The Petersen is a multi level museum with over 300,000 square feet of display space. The museum even includes a couple of cool displays in the carpark to get you started. We spent a couple of hours here checking out all the cars on display and then headed on to the next stop of the day.

The next stop was the Wally Parks NHRA Motorsports Museum, all the way over the other side of town at the Pomona Fairplex. The Wally Parks houses displays from a number of motorsports disciplines, including drag racing, land speed racing and road racing. If that doesn't sound good enough already, the first Wednesday of the month, the Wally Parks hosts a cruise in for local hot rodders and customisers, with around 500 cars dropping in to the front carpark over the afternoon and evening.

We also caught up with some of the Cranksters, who were in Los Angeles until this evening, heading straight from the Wally Parks to the airport to fly out to Louisville. We'll catch up with them again before the trip is over. When we pulled out of the Wally Parks carpark, we headed over to nearby San Dimas to check out the Circle K that featured in Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure.

We then decided to head back to the hotel for the night, with the intention of stopping somewhere along the way for dinner. After pulling off the interstate and taking some of the suburban roads for a bit of variety on the way home, we managed to make it all the way back to the hotel without passing anything that really grabbed our attention, so we parked the Cadillac in the carpark, put all our gear back in the room and walked across the road to get some Mexican food for dinner. While waiting for our dinner I wandered a little way down the road to grab a few photos of some neon signs, then we headed back to our rooms to eat dinner and discuss our plans for tomorrow, while I made a start on sorting the days photos.

About Me

In my daily life, I am a parts interpreter at a Holden dealer, but in my spare time, I'm a motorsport and event photographer who dabbles in a little landscape and nature work. A bit of a jack of all trades photographically, I guess.

Neither job pays particularly well, but the day job pays well enough and lets me walk away stress free at the end of the day so that I can concentrate on taking photos and not have to worry about what I need to do at work tomorrrow.

I have spent a bit of time travelling around Australia when I was younger, and am a big fan of taking road trips when I can. In 2009, I bought a car over eBay and had it delivered to my brothers place in San Jose, California. I made my first visit to the US in August of that year and spent a month around San Jose and San Francisco. I then left the car in the trusty hands of my brother and his wife, and promised to get it out of their yard as soon as I could organise shipping. As it turns out, that didn't happen for a while, as I ended up going back in August the following year for a 5000 mile road trip taking in the sights of California, Utah, Nevada and a little of Arizona.

As of July 2015, I've added a few more stamps to the passport, but not been back to the USA again. I am, however, planning on changing that in August 2016, with another road trip from California to the Bonneville salt and beyond.